Review by New York Times Review
With harlots in fish-net stockings hanging on each arm, a self-satisfied grandee, shades and ascot in place, struts down a city sidewalk. A policeman clears the way, and as he kicks a blind beggar into traffic, he bellows, "Out of the way, you swine! A cartoonist is coming!" TO THE FEW HUNDRED American oddballs who draw funny pictures for a living, there's never been a more hilariously inapt portrait of a cartoon professional than the one described above, inked by the great B. Kliban late in his career. Many of us have a copy pinned to our walls, not to keep us humble (we have no choice), but to celebrate our forced distance from the more conventional metrics of success. As Cullen Murphy admits in his warm and graceful memoir, "Cartoon County," comics creators have long been among the most dimly perceived of celebrities, and when they venture out into society, they are usually sized up as dentists or insurance adjusters long before the awful truth comes tumbling out. Fortunately, this is not a significant problem, since the syndicated cartoonist is rarely spotted at large. The deadlines and hours are brutal, and too much involvement with the real world takes time away from the alternate universe the artist must ceaselessly oversee. Newspaper comics are regarded as a kind of public utility - a reliable, 365-days-a-year source of light entertainment. For those whose weekly transmissions keep the machine up and running, every Friday deadline can seem a freight train bearing down, threatening to overwhelm their creative capacity and self-confidence. A few careers have ended in drink, but more typically the rolling dread keeps cartoonists home and out of trouble. Only one of our number has ever been drummed out of the National Cartoonists Society for "conduct unbecoming a member." (Don't ask.) This permanent state of anxiety can be notoriously rough on families, although there's little evidence of that in Cullen's remembrance of his father, John Murphy, known widely as Jack and the artist behind the majestic "Prince Valiant." Jack inherited the strip from its original creator, Hal Foster, in 1970, a transition of auspices so seamless that most readers were unaware of it. Years later, Cullen joined his father in the studio as the strip's writer, and it is from that unique vantage that this stylishly written and illustrated field guide to the American Cartoonist and his midcentury habitat is drawn. As he grew up, in postwar Cos Cob, Conn., the young Murphy enjoyed the company of his father's merry colleagues, most of whom were clustered in the surrounding area. Fairfield County had become home to the nation's leading illustrators and cartoonists, primarily because of proximity to New York City's syndicates and magazines, but also because of the lack of a state income tax. The county had not yet become the exclusive suburb of choice for hedge fund managers, and homeownership was still within the means of artists with irregular paychecks. Most were World War II veterans, and several had formal art training before the war, leading to some interesting postings. Bil Keane of "The Family Circus" drew a feature for Pacific Stars and Stripes. "Gordo's" Gus Arriola made animated training films. Jack Murphy's talent had landed him in the Pacific headquarters of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, where he found himself assigned to do oil and watercolor portraits of the senior staff. Judging from his diaries and letters, he did little else but attend church services and work, completing no fewer than six portraits of MacArthur himself, as well as three of the general's wife and one of his son. As Cullen puts it, "Mass. Paint. Mass. Paint. Mass. Paint. Substitute the pope for the Old Man, and the schedule might have been Michelangelo's." Whatever their wartime contributions, the returning cartoonists couldn't wait to shrug offthe regimentation of military life and return to their "vaguely anarchic" chosen field. The 1950s and early '60s were the Golden Age of American comics, or at least its glorious tail end. Newspapers were fat and happy, and the hugely popular Sunday comics supplement - comprising about 35 square feet of strips! - arrived on doorsteps wrapped around the news sections, not tucked inside. Cullen recalls an experiment conducted by the supplement's parent company, Hearst: Various sections of the paper were omitted to see who would notice and care. When a news section was missing, only a small fraction of people called in. When the comics were leftout, almost 90 percent of readers complained. Jack's original creation was a prizefighter strip called "Big Ben Bolt," but he dedicated much of his career to "Prince Valiant," which, by the time he took it over, was already in a class by itself, a stately tent pole of the Sunday comics. With its exquisitely detailed scenes and lack of dialogue balloons, it bore little resemblance to its comics-page peers, evoking instead the elegant illustrations of Gilded Age storybooks. Its level of craftsmanship made "Prince Valiant" a classy anomaly, which is perhaps why it was often placed on the final page of the section, away from the bigfoot riffraff. Reading it was a bit of a commitment, as its pacing compelled the reader to slow down, to linger over the intricate images. In designing the page, father and son worked in masterly counterpoint, the text sections and images sliding gracefully past one another in time, interrupted only by the "gutters," those white spaces between panels where the reader's imagination took over, advancing the story. It was an erudite enterprise, meticulously researched and plotted out months in advance. Preparation included consulting voluminous files of images that Jack collected over the years, carefully cataloged under headings like "Ne'er-do-wells, General," "Arthurian" or "Unrequited." When just the right image could not be located, one of the children was summoned to take Polaroids of their father festooned in medieval costume or wielding armaments that he stored in the back of the studio. If a child's pose was needed, Cullen or a sibling was drafted as the model; a queen required the participation of their mother, Joan. Even a visiting neighbor or milkman might be enlisted, only to see himself pop up in the comics six weeks later dressed as a barbarian or wizard. On one occasion, when Cullen pointed out to his father that every face in a band of Goths resembled Jack's own, he brushed it off, replying that they all would have been related anyway. These entertaining casting calls aside, Jack mostly worked alone, either in silence or with "Million Dollar Movie" on in the background. When his son joined the family business - "the guild," Cullen calls it - his occasional presence must have been welcome, but collaboration was mostly conducted from a distance. Still working in isolation, Jack would have had no need to alter the cartoonist's dress code, one of rumpled indifference. One evening he was discovered with a rope holding up his pants. Every day being sub-"Casual Friday" was one of the few perks of the business. All that mattered to his employers was his packet of sublime medieval illuminations, delivered on time. Cullen Murphy has had other notable successes as an editor, essayist and author, all presumably head-clearing pursuits that give him a valuable perspective lacking in those of us who rarely come up for air. I was especially moved by his modest appraisal of the ultimate significance of our profession: "Was it anything more noteworthy than bringing laughter (and adventure) to other human beings, while keeping the show on the road? What any civilization mostly needs is not the worldaltering legacy of a few but the numberless people of talent who play a role . . . sustaining their contemporaries in the brief moment we have together." In Murphy's reckoning, cartoonists are no more or less indispensable to society than the dentists and adjusters they evidently resemble. They simply play their part. Still, Murphy obviously knows how lucky he's been: There are worse places to work than Camelot. In designing the page for 'Prince Valiant,' father and son worked in masterly counterpoint. GARRY TRUDEAU is a cartoonist and the creator of the "Doonesbury" comic strip.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
When the Mad men and other office warriors took the train to Manhattan in the 1950s, a smaller group of mild men stayed behind in suburban Connecticut, toiling over drawing boards and churning out newspaper comic strips in home studios. These professional and social cohorts, who self-mockingly deemed themselves The Connecticut School, were a curious mix of artistic bohemia and Eisenhower-era conformity. Murphy was in the midst of the scene as the son of John Cullen Murphy, illustrator of Prince Valiant and Big Ben Bolt. His memoir provides sharp but loving observations of the tight-knit clan that shared a strong commitment to family, a love of golf, and that early-'50s Clark Kent-ish look. He also offers a brief history of the comic strip and a profile of his father, emphasizing his WWII service. Nearly all the Connecticut School members are gone now, and newspaper comics, like newspapers themselves, are on the wane. Murphy's paean to this bygone era and endangered art form make the reader keenly feel what's been lost.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vanity Fair editor at large Murphy (God's Jury) captures a slice of American pop culture from the mid-20th century, when a prominent group of comic-strip and gag cartoonists, known as the Connecticut School, resided in the town of Greenwich, Conn. Murphy draws from his own life-his father was John Cullen Murphy, known as the illustrator of such strips as Big Ben Bolt and Prince Valiant-to paint a sprawling portrait of many of the scene's luminaries, including Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey), Dik Browne (Hägar the Horrible), and dozens of others who were members of this group, examining their family and social lives, their work habits, their art techniques, and more. Having spent a good portion of his life among these people, even taking the writing reins of Prince Valiant after writer Hal Foster retired while his father still drew it, Cullen crafts an immensely evocative look at an art colony many don't know existed. He writes with a personable mix of affection and realism that offers a vivid sense of what it was like to be in that crowd, and to be a working cartoonist in the decades following WWII. Particularly fascinating are the parts of the book on Cullen's father's experiences in the Army and on his father's relationship with his mentor, Norman Rockwell. Color illus. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Murphy (The World According to Eve) recalls the heyday of comic strips in a tribute to his father, John Cullen Murphy, as well as other illustrators who lived in the Fairfield County, CT, area during the 1950s and 1960s. Trained by Norman Rockwell, John was among a group of artists who created strips like his own "Prince Valiant," Mort Walker's "Beetle Bailey," and Leonard Starr's "Little Orphan -Annie." These comics, some enduring today, populated the pages of daily newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. The author details how this group, known as the Connecticut School, flourished in suburbs outside of New York, selling their creations to large syndicates that distributed and licensed their work to publications around the country and throughout the world. VERDICT Amply illustrated with examples of work from John Murphy and other artists, this heartfelt look back at this still-beloved Sunday morning staple will be appreciated by readers nostalgic for the comic strips of their youth and for fans of contemporary graphic media. [See Prepub Alert, 5/15/17.]-Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
